Unclear Description: Bodyguard Babes

What is the trope here? Person has hot females as bodyguards to combine necessity with personal pleasure? Person has a portable harem that is secretly a batch of undercover bodyguards?

Currently the description pretty much reads "bodyguards that are female".

Once the description's been clarified, a laconic would be useful to add too.

Yep, the description there sounds like Not A Trope. We need to insert some reasons for its usage in stories.

Clocking due to lack of activity.

It's a double show of power. It's hot women and violence in one convenient package.

X And Also Y = Rarely a Trope.

Crowner screwed to thread.

But in this case it is.

This convention seems to be "having bodyguards not only for protection but also for Fetish and/or fanservice"

Calling the crowner in favor of keeping the page...I suppose the next step is to figure out how to tighten the definition.

Hmm, how about something like this:

If you want to show that a powerful character (often the villain) is a pervert, or at least sexually obsessed, one easy route is to surround him (usually it's a him) with a bevy of extremely attractive bodyguards, often impractically dressed in a Chainmail Bikini or other Stripperiffic garb. He may want protection, but that comes second to ensuring that he's properly stimulated; the best fighters in the realm, if they're the wrong sex or insufficiently hot, need not apply for the job.

edited 2nd Aug '12 1:43:11 PM by Xtifr

Sounds good to me.

Xtifr's description sounds good.

It's good but insufficient, though.

Sometimes the character isn't a bad guy, and isn't a pervert. Sometimes, the character with bodyguard babes is just a Chick Magnet, even a clueless one, who is being protected by his Unwanted Harem.

Other times, there may be a legit reason why all of the protectors are female—such as the opposite of perversion: to prove that women are equally suited.

There's lots of other reasons, too: in Star Wars, Amidala's female bodyguards sometimes moonlighted as body doubles.

edited 3rd Aug '12 5:05:33 AM by KingZeal

Is the Star Wars example really an instance of this trope? There's no real reason for the female guards to be all that attractive and/or dressed in Stripperiffic armor, except maybe for those who work as body doubles (which would, I guess, be a seperate trope anyway). Same for Positive Discrimination.

Good point about the Chick Magnet, though. Do you have examples of that?

edited 3rd Aug '12 8:34:01 AM by jkbeta

I agree my description isn't sufficient as it stands—it was intended as a starting point.

However, "female bodyguards" is not a trope! So we can't just take every instance of female bodyguards in fiction and try to make the description fit that.

eta: I'm not sure about the Chick Magnet thing—I'd like to have some examples—but I'm certain that Amidala's bodyguards do not fit with the other examples we have in a way that can be described as a trope.

edited 3rd Aug '12 12:22:50 PM by Xtifr

The trope doesn't specify that the bodyguards have to guard a male. It just says it's the most common example, unless that was recently added.

I recall seeing it in anime a few times, but I don't watch it often enough to remember specifics. The trope page even acknowledges as much—again, unless that was recently added.

edited 8th Aug '12 6:15:38 AM by KingZeal

I didn't mean to say that the person being guarded had to be male. The point I was trying to make is that having a bodyguard consisting of specifically hot females is one thing, which in my opinion is different from an all-female bodyguard for Positive Discrimination reasons or an all-female bodyguard that will occasionally provide body doubles. In a way, the latter two cases are justified, even if for different reasons, while the former case is not (ok, if the character being guarded is a Chick Magnet, things are more complicated, but actual bodyguards? Can't remember having seen that, even in anime).

Even if we can't remember any, someone else might. Is there a reason the trope needs to be so specific?

Ok, just to make sure we are on the same page: are we arguing about whether to include the Chick Magnet case (I have no problem with that, btw - I'm just wondering if it actually occurs or is mostly theoretical), or about something else?

I really don't think an Unwanted Harem is the same trope, even if they act like bodyguards. Examples of the Chick Magnet (and whatever the distaff version is) that don't involve an Unwanted Harem might apply, but probably not because the person is a magnet. More like because they know they're a magnet and enjoy flaunting it, which gets back into the perv-and-or-sex-obsessed territory that I started with.

You're dismissing the possibility of an overlap, which is the part I don't understand. The two are not necessarily the same trope, but I'm not fond of making it required for the person being protected to be a villain or a perv.

We should allow for some flexibility here - how about stating this is the usual case?

That's perfectly fine.

I've seen gender-flipped versions where a woman has a cadre of all male bodyguards that are clearly there for the same reason that men have all-female bodyguards.

No problem there - this trope is not Always Female (or should that be Always Male) anyway. Listing it as gender flip should be fine.